


Isn't Love

by toujours_nigel



Category: Maurice - E. M. Forster
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 15:32:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: None. - Warning
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2817260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little bit more than an embrace in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Isn't Love

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the Brazil Flood Auction in 2011

The kiss in the night, and the day-long wandering. Nothing more. Never anything more, Clive would have said if anyone had thought to—known to—ask him. Maurice, if anyone asks him—as Alec has, Alec who can’t quite believe anyone could be with Maurice and not be with him, not love him how he plainly wants to be loved—crooks his mouth into a smile that sits wrong on his generous, laughing mouth, and says, “He never touched me, not that way.”

He hadn’t, either, not Clive who clung to his belief that chastity—or nearly so—made everything right; simply looked, one long golden afternoon behind the locked door of Maurice’s rooms in Cambridge, stared and stared and stared till Maurice was blotchily red and ducking his head to hide his smile, until he was looking back up with wide, disconcerted eyes, asking, “What is it, what do you want, Clive, what is it?” in a strangled, breathless voice. He could not have said what it was _he_ wanted, only that Clive was sitting too far away, only that it was unbearable to have him look so very hungry, and still stay quiet with his hands folded in his lap.

When he reached out, Clive stroked a hand carefully through Maurice’s unkempt hair, over the sweep of cheekbone and curve of jaw—all distinctly improper between friends save as they were, and with them strictly within the bounds of propriety. Maurice leaned into the touch, following, rising half out of his seat, tempted to clamber over the table, just to stay connected—it was almost as though Clive’s fingertips were magnetic in his attraction for them, as though they were changing his skin. He wanted to taste them, to kiss Clive’s wrist, to roll up his sleeve, to leave a trail of kisses up Clive’s arm. Having once committed himself to the sin of loving a man, he wanted the enormity of it, the monstrous pleasures. In his room, at night, he had laboriously deciphered the Plato he had plundered from Clive’s library, and felt none of the kinship with the white horse his friend so obviously did.

Already he had drawn back, flushed slightly, mouth tilted into a rueful smile. When he said, “You look wonderful,” his voice had in it a note of pained honesty. Yet even then he wanted only to protect Maurice—protect himself—from the impetuous manner with which he grasped at all things, however dimly understood.

But he had sounded the retreat too late. Already Maurice had divined by some animal intuition that Clive was at his lowest, and grasping nothing of the consequences, caring nothing save for the knowledge that a little pursuit now could gain him great rewards, he said, “Anything you want, simply ask. Clive, look at me, please.” If he had known how he appeared, he would scarcely have disdained pressing even that to his advantage, but used as he was to perceiving himself as slow and clumsy and over-large, he could only wield the dreadful weapon of a heart offered in full earnest.

To Clive he seemed compelling, the dimming rays of the westering sun limning his hair and casting his face into shadow; at his throat a golden triangle of skin rested inside the open collar. “Let me look at you,” he said, barely managing them as words. This was a sin, a sin compounding already the sin of love between men, and Plato said... but Maurice was devilish handsome, and already he could see more of that white, vulnerable throat. To tell him to stop, now, might ruin the friendship he’d worked so tirelessly to preserve. And then he was coming to Clive, hardly bothering even to set his feet on the floor, knocking his hip against the table and not noticing, wrapping him in his arms and dragging him to his feet, and murmuring ecstasy in his ear between kisses.

Clive, stunned by the embrace, and struggling to gather himself enough to speak an admonition, and struggling to find words that would ward Maurice off and not wound him, found himself kissed on the cheek, jaw, temple, throat. He had refused, as a boy, to reconcile himself to the necessity of self-abuse, and waking in soiled sheets had seemed always proof of his own weakness—just recently he had found again, miserably, that his body had conquered his will and not his mind his desires; and now the man who had so weakened his defences was mounting so overwhelming an attack. After all, he had not loved Maurice for his mind, only nobly sought to improve it, assigning it his obligation as erastes.

This was his obligation, too, but he knew only what men must never do together, lest they harm the other’s standing; his modesty had let him learn nothing of what they could and did do, in the gymnasium and the agora and behind doors that locked as easily as the doors in Cambridge. Maurice, who certainly knew even less, seemed only to want to get closer, burrow under his clothes as though he would burrow under his skin, take Clive into himself, be as one. Forsake all others and cleave to him, Clive had thought, and to drown the chill of superstition, pulled Maurice even closer and kissed him, almost savage in his despair.

Maurice, who for all his bravado had been afraid Clive would balk, became conscious of a shift in Clive’s grip on him, and joyfully ceded control, though he was certain his own brute strength would have carried them rapidly onward, instead of so soon pausing, as perforce they must when Clive’s passions ran their too-short course. Still, it was more than pleasant to have Clive stroke his delicate hands gently over his sides, like soothing a panting horse, and fingers down his throat and over his shoulder like admiring a statue, and returning, once more, to kiss him.

“We cannot,” he said, stepping back to leave between their bodies a decorous distance, as though they had not been so recently entangled. “My dear, I love you.” Maurice’s head came up at that, his mouth opened, and Clive, recognising the warning signs that his friend was about to plunge into passionate, disordered speech, added, “We cannot behave like this, like a man and a woman.”

All Maurice’s splendour faded at that—he was no longer the man who had clambered through Clive’s window a month ago, simply a boy a few years older than the one who had ploughed through a mediocre speech upon leaving school, slow and clumsy and over-large. “You’re right,” he managed, and, because it was impossible to ask Clive to leave, vacated his rooms as soon as decently possible, buttoning his shirt as he took the stairs, two in every loping stride.

Clive sank back into his seat, aware he had intended to say that acting the woman would dishonour both, and as aware that he had said precisely what he had wanted to.


End file.
